Holy Water

My earliest memory of pure joy is linked to a hot afternoon before Labor Day, the year I turned five. The day began as miserably as many other summer Sundays. My parents planned to drop my brother and me off at Sunday school on their way to brunch, a proposition which struck us as not only unfair, but unholy. My pale yellow dress, ironed to fluffy perfection by my mother the night before, now clung limply around me in the humid morning air. I stood on the sidewalk in front of the church, a wilted, unhappy daffodil in drooping socks and patent leather shoes. My brother kicked the curb next to the Buick while my mother rummaged in her purse for two collection envelopes filled with coins, which we'd have to hand over before refreshment time. She wasn't religious in the least. The Unitarian Church was a safe, reliable once-a-week babysitter, and naturally, one had to ante up.

"Don't do that, Pete, you'll scuff your loafers," she said to my brother, who was now kicking the back tire, then the curb, then the tire, with annoyed precision. "C'mon, ladies and gents, step lively. We'll come back for you both at noon and head for the pool."

My mother viewed this last idea as an exciting one, a tasty carrot to dangle in front of her woebegone mules. She had been a champion swimmer, and couldn't imagine a person not wanting to plunge immediately into any available body of water, whether it was a bathtub, rocky creek, murky lake, or a public pool saturated with enough chlorine to turn your eyes red and your hair green. Surely no greater pleasure could be had in Maryland during August than diving off the high board into an expanse of cool blue, perhaps accidentally splashing the perfectly coiffed women who sat poolside, inert in the heat, with thermoses and magazines and lipstick tubes at the ready. Mom always did her laps without visible effort, gliding along like a dolphin under the water's surface, or squinting against the sun while her backstroke took her seamlessly from one end of the pool to the other.

I hadn't especially minded the pool until my mother tried to teach me to swim. I hadn't even minded that as much as when she gave up on me in frustration and enrolled me in swimming class. The lessons at the recreation center were a grim and regimented affair - nothing like the noisy Free Swim period, which I had rather enjoyed, bobbing shyly in the shallow end while watching the other children tumble down the slimy, slippery stairs into the pool. They looked like visitors from another planet to me, fascinating otherworldly beings wriggling through the water in glowing yellow bathing caps and goggles, some with giant plastic lobster claws or frog legs extending from the inner tubes perched on their torsos for safety. "Marco! Polo! Marco! Polo!" they yelled from all corners of the pool above the lifeguard's deafening megaphoned directives.

Classes, held three times a week, were scary and occasionally humiliating. The early morning quiet was broken only by our dedicated kicking and paddling, or the barking of the stern instructor, a sea monster in charge of a group of tadpoles. All of the classes had deceptively poetic names to mask the different levels of aquatic torture involved. I was a Starfish. I longed to be a Seahorse, or even a Minnow like my friend Sarah, but for those categories you had to be able to float. I had been a Starfish for two summers now, achieving at best a sort of standing dog-paddle or hurried kick-and-sink. Now the class was filled with children younger than me. I would be a Starfish all my life, consigned to the shallows. My brother was already a Seal, a category so far beyond reach one might as well aspire to fly to the moon.

If my mother noticed my despair that particular Sunday, after we'd unpacked the bathing suits and beach towels from the Buick's trunk and emerged from the locker rooms at the recreation center, she ignored it. She fastened her flowered swim cap and sauntered happily over to the two diving boards at the far end, my brother the Seal hurrying beside her, leaving my father to arrange the pile of chairs and towels on the grass and watch over me.

"A Guppy isn't the worst thing you could be," said my father sagely, as he lay down and covered his eyes with the paperback novel he'd brought. "Starfish, Dad," I said, pained. "Not Guppy. They don't even have Guppies here." But he had already fallen asleep.

And so it was that neither of my parents noticed as an anguished five-year-old edged over to the side of the pool that day, past the lifeguard, past the perfectly lipsticked mothers, past the Minnows and the Sharks and the Seals on the slippery steps, past the blue markers separating the shallow end from the main pool, and into the deep end. I slipped quietly into the water and tried to swim to my mother. And I couldn't, of course. I'd never managed to paddle and kick at the same time, and now, gazing panic-stricken at the pool floor so very far beneath me, I saw I'd been foolish to even hope that I could perform such a feat. I inhaled a mouthful of water as I began to slip beneath the surface despite my frantic paddling. Surely I'd end up as all starfish do, at the very bottom.

"You won't swallow water if you turn over on your back," a kind voice said from somewhere near my left shoulder. "Here, give it a try." I flipped over, coughing, eyes stinging and shut tight, and felt a hand under my back, supporting me. My breathing slowed and I extended my legs, lying back comfortably against the water, safe. I couldn't see the distance below me and it was nice to imagine that I was in the shallow end again, near the steps, near my father. I opened my eyes to see who was helping me. No one was there. There was no hand under me, and I knew at once there never had been. I was floating.

"What the hell?" cried my mother, when my brother spied me at last and tugged her out of the line at the diving board. "Get out of the pool! Right now!"

I saw her yell at my dad a few minutes later, her hands on her hips; she yelled at me too before she packed up our stuff in the beach bags and stomped off ahead of us to the locker room. But I didn't even care. I had floated, all by myself. And someone inside me had known how to do it a minute before I did.

If I've learned anything since that day, it's that sometimes we have to want what we want, more than we want to be safe, for despair lurks in the shallow end - not in the depths, as we are trained to believe. We may have to jump all the way in, scared and mad and hopeless, with no guarantee anything will work out one morsel better than it did yesterday. More often than not, bliss is there, like an unseen hand, letting us know we are safe after all; we can leap, we can fly, we can float.

Stacy Appel is a writer in California whose work has been featured in The Chicago Tribune and other publications. She has also written for National Public Radio.

~Stacy Appel